Via the Corporate Law Blog, a judge summing up e-filing times:

bq. …Corp Law Blog offers the following order, dated July 1, 2003, entered by Magistrate Judge Stephen L. Crocker of the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC v. Microsoft Corporation:

bq. Pursuant to the modified scheduling order, the parties in this case had until June 25, 2003 to file summary judgment motions. Any electronic document may be e-filed until midnight on the due date. In a scandalous affront to this court’s deadlines, Microsoft did not file its summary judgment motion until 12:04:27 a.m. on June 26, 2003, with some supporting documents trickling in as late as 1:11:15 a.m. I don’t know this personally because I was home sleeping, but that’s what the court’s computer docketing program says, so I’ll accept it as true. Continue reading →

There’s an article in USA Today that gives some detail about Microsoft’s attempts to keep the City of Munich as a customer and why Munich chose Linux. Via Slashdot.

Here is a bizarre and untranslatable term: the Ortsgericht in Hessen (I think we write Hessen in English now, and no longer Hesse?) I think Saturday was the second time I’d heard of it. It consists of a number of unpaid persons, a bit like lay magistrates, who do exciting things like certifying signatures on holographic wills (I didn’t think that was necessary). Romain has ‘local court’ as a translation, but that doesn’t seem right, as it isn’t a court.

But Lister and Veth (see June 7th entry) do not let me down:

bq. local special court in Hessen (staffed by lay judges and with jurisdiction over certain unlitigated private law matters)

Creifelds defines it too, as a special court with a narrow range of tasks in non-contentious jursidiction. They only exist in Hessen now. Members are the Ortsgerichtsvorsteher and Ortsgerichtsschöffen. Here are some (in German): Habichtswald, Pfungstadt, and a more general description, with links to the statute and the fee scale.

A consultation paper on a supreme court for the UK has been published as a PDF file.

At last we see what was meant by ‘a supreme court’.

From the executive summary:

bq. The paper sets out the Government’s proposal to remove the jurisdiction of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and transfer it to a new Supreme Court. This would be a Supreme Court for the United Kingdom, and would be quite separate from the England and Wales or Scottish or Northern Ireland courts. The present Lords of Appeal in Ordinary (the 12 full-time Law Lords) would form the initial members of the new Court. They would cease, while members of the Court, to be able to sit and vote in the House of Lords. There is no proposal to create a Supreme Court on the US model with the power to overturn legislation. Nor is there any proposal to create a specific constitutional court, or one whose primary role would be to give preliminary rulings on difficult points of law.

There is also the question of whether the jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council should be transferred to this new court, which the government would prefer.

Discussion will centre on how appointments are to be made, what title the judges should have, whether there should be experienced part-time judges helping out (as they do now), and how to ensure there are enough representatives of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

I have quoted Volker G. Heinz here before in connection with notaries.

I find a 2001 report of a UINL (Internationale Union des Lateinischen Notariats) conference in Greece where he mentions the civil-law notaries in the USA:

bq. Ein Erlebnis war für mich die Reise nach Athen fast allein wert: die Entdeckung des “Civil Law Notary” in den USA. Wahrend der amerikanische “Notary Public” im wesentlichen Beglaubigungs- und Bescheinigungsfunktionen ausübt und vor allem fast durchgängig ohne allgemeine juristische Vorbildung ist, haben die
US-Staaten Florida und Alabama (neben Puerto Rico) den Notar nach lateinischem Vorbild, also den Civil Law Notary eingeführt. Seine Dienstleistungen entsprechen denen seiner EU-
europäischen Notarskollegen, konzentrieren sich also auf Beurkundungen, allerdings ohne Dienstleistungsmonopol: insoweit stehen die Civil Law Notaries in direkter Konkurrenz mit den örtlichen attorneys. Die Urkunden der Civil Law Notaries haben erhöhten Beweiswert vor Gericht, ja sie können auch für vollstreckbar erklärt werden – eine ebenso überraschende wie verständliche Entwicklung im offensichtlich allmählich prozeß- weil kostenmüden Kernland exzessiver gerichtlicher Auseinandersetzungen. Gerne werde ich dazu mehr ausführen, sobald mir nähere schriftliche Informationen vorliegen.

One factoid I picked up from Barbara Müller-Grant at the seminar on Saturday was that there are now civil-law notaries in Florida – and apparently in Alabama too. Web searches reveal a fair amount of information. These people are trained lawyers who do a course giving 18 hours, for example, of credits for CLE (continuing legal education – Weiterbildung). I think the first exam was held in March 2003.

They can help residents buy and sell land abroad – for instance, in Germany or in Brazil.

The National Association of Civil Law Notaries was founded in 1998. The site gives links to materials in English and German (and French and Spanish). Its links inside the USA also include Louisiana. Its links outside the USA

The Louisiana law refers to notaries public. But the new civil-law notaries in Alabama and Florida don’t use the word ‘public’.

The Louisiana code extract is in English. The Alabama extract appears in English, French and Spanish. But the Florida version appears in Spanish, French and German. The translations are interesting, in view of the fact that we sometimes have to translate German notarial boilerplate into English.

Unlike ‘notary public’, the term ‘civil-law notary’ is permitted to be translated into other languages. See also Wikipedia on this. Continue reading →